Memorandum submitted by The Institute
of Sport and Recreation Management
The Institute is an educational charity established
in 1921 by the Department of Health to regulate the use and control
of swimming pools. As the nature of sport and recreation in society
has changed with time so has the Institute's today our charitable
objectives are:
To promote for the public benefit facilities
and opportunities to encourage participation in sport and other
recreational activities in the interest of Health and Social Welfare.
We achieve these aims through providing education
and training and qualifications for those who work and manage
sporting facilities.
The Institute has over 1,400 members who manage
sports facilities and departments mainly in the public sector,
together with 400 members of the National Association for Sports
Development who develop sport in communities and nearly 300 corporate
members, organisations who own or who are concerned with the operation
of sports facilities.
Institute Representative
I am Ralph Riley, Chief Executive of the Institute:
I am also, Chair of the National Pool Water Treatment Advisory
Group, Chair of the National Swimming Forum, UK expert on the
European Committee for the Safety of Swimming Pools and an executive
director of the Industry Training Organisation for Sport and Recreation
and of the Swimathon Foundation. For 25 years, I managed and directed
sport and recreation services in the public sector.
HISTORIC SWIMMING
POOLS AND
THE PROBLEMS
AFFECTING THESE
LISTED BUILDINGS
Importance to history
At the turn of the last century this country
was very concerned that public health suffered through poor hygiene
and a lack of facilities where health and hygiene could be improved,
this concern gave cause to the establishment in municipalities
of the public swimming bath. The majority of these buildings are
now gone and with them a significant feature of our history. It
is the view of the Institute that historic swimming pools that
are good examples of these early swimming pools should be preserved
for posterity. Tragically we have lost many of the best examples
including "lidos" that were once such an important aspect
of our leisure time activity in Britain after the Great War.
It would be difficult to run most of these deserving
buildings viably so if they are to be retained then special funding
should be provided to the local authorities that own them.
Practicality
Whilst these pools can never reflect today's
modern pools standards particularly with regard to pool hygiene,
with a little adaptation and ingenuity most could still be used
to provide a useful swimming pool function for the communities
in which they are located. Some will require special preservation
methods for swimming pool structures suffer over time due to their
exposure to humidity and damp conditions. On the other hand many
are very robust buildings built to standards far higher than those
we use today with engineering based on some of the finest examples
borrowed from our nations proud ship building traditions. As Chair
of the National Pool Water Treatment Advisory Group and a former
operator of pools of this type, I can see no reason why these
pools cannot meet satisfactory pool water and hygiene standards.
SWIMMING FACILITIES
AVAILABLE IN
COMMUNITIES
Swimming for all
Swimming is an activity that nearly everyone
can take part in from the very elderly to tiny babies, from the
supremely fit to people with disabilities and medical conditions.
People swim for fitness, for sport, and for fun. There are many
specialist activities that take place in swimming pools for example,
competitive swimming and diving, water polo, sub aqua, life saving,
synchronised swimming, aquarobics, canoe practice, mother and
babies, ante natal exercise and movement and hydro therapy. Swimming
is one of the few forms of exercise that is suitable for the obese.
Obesity costs the country hundreds of millions of pounds each
year in National Health Service costs, 60 per cent of the population
are overweight. Swimming as a preventative measure and as part
of a rehabilitation programme to fight obesity has the potential
to release vital efficiency gains for the health service.
Scale of provision
We have over 1,400 public swimming pools in
England and over 2,300 school swimming pools. A number of recent
reports from Sport England and Sport Scotland have identified
that many of these pools are approaching a critical time. The
majority of our public pools were built in the early 1970s and
are now 30 years old. In a great many cases they have not been
maintained properly as a result of available funding and in consequence
are now unappealing, outdated and dilapidated. To maintain our
existing swimming stock will require around £2 billion, to
maintain our existing stock of sport and recreation buildings
in communities that includes swimming pools requires £4 billion.
Even then the sad fact is that the Country is the poor relation
in comparison to most other contemporary countries in terms of
sporting provision. It is estimated that to achieve the sport
and recreation facilities required to serve the needs of our population
would take an additional investment of £10 billion. These
figures are provided from the finance companies currently preparing
bids for PPP schemes for sport and recreation in local authorities.
Local authorities' net expenditure on sport
and leisure is £1.5 billion a year, £300 million of
which is spent on swimming pools and sports halls with swimming
pools. The Government's annual income from taxes on sport is £4.185
billion.
Popularity
Swimming is extremely popular today particularly
with adults who take part in lane or fitness swimming. The new
Commonwealth Pool in Manchester for example devotes 70 per cent
of pool time to this activity and is likely to achieve a throughput
this year of 750,000 swims. The Manchester pool can only do this
because it is designed for good community use, it has two 50 metre
pools and a 25 metre diving pool all of which have moveable floors
and booms, it also has a fun area for kids to play in, so can
be used for a wide variety of community and sporting activities.
All swimming pools should incorporate safe areas of water for
small children, this means providing plenty of water space below
1.2 metres in depth, ideally integrated in a separate learner
pool that gives added security and safety. Leisure water and fun
features incorporated into pools are also useful in providing
the initial focus of children's attention that can be nurtured
into a love for swimming. Flexibility in design is important for
pools in the UK as our pools are very intensively used. We don't
have for example the climate to support outdoor pools that feature
so prominently in many other countries.
We estimate that there are over three billion
visits made to swimming pools in the UK every year. The main growth
area in swimming is in fitness swimming and to some extent children's
swimming has declined for unless you have flexible designs like
the Manchester pool then it is difficult for children's play to
co-exist with lane swimming.
Child swimming concerns
A further reason we suspect for a reduction
in swimming in children is the extent that children learn to swim
in school. The issues concerning school swimming are access, funding
and strategy. In terms of access and funding it is clear from
the Ofsted report that inner city and urban schools could not
afford to teach swimming. There were pools available for them
but they could not afford to access them. Yet quite often what
prevents access is in reality a paper transaction, a transfer
of funds from a school or LEA to a local authority sports department
to reflect the revenue cost of the school using the swimming pool.
The role of public swimming provision
Public swimming pools are provided from the
public purse, people pay for them and like hospitals, schools,
parks and roads people should be entitled to use them for public
good.
This means that if we really care for and love
our children and if we are a truly civilised society then we should
ensure all children become swimmers and water safe. So the facilities
we provide to teach children should be theirs by right. That this
principle should be denied by what amounts to a book transaction,
a notional transfer of funds, is evidentially nonsense. Why should
a school or an LEA pay a local authority for the use of a public
swimming pool? All are publicly funded bodies; the money comes
from the same pot! To move to a more enlightened position would
of course require that public pools be recognised as part of the
fundamental infrastructure of society just like schools, roads,
parks and hospitals but as a civilised society isn't this recognition
long overdue!
Swimming in school
The role of school swimming requires greater
emphasis in the school programme, we recommend that:
swimming is a life skill and for
this reason should occupy a unique place within the school teaching
programme and is one of the fundamental reasons why swimming pools
are provided and operated by local authorities to benefit their
communities;
Local Authorities and or Local Education
Authorities should be responsible and accountable for the development
and delivery of a strategy for school swimming that addresses
the requirements of the National Curriculum. Those who are responsible
for the operation and programming of pools are best placed to
co-ordinate this work to make best use of scarce resources and
ensure that the scheme benefits from any economies of scale;
Key Stage 2 attainment targets should
always be regarded and referred to as a starting point and not
as proof of swimming competence. We suspect that children do not
learn to swim as well under the Key Stage 2 requirement as they
did in previous years, the result is that they do not feel confident
enough to, later on outside school, pursue swimming as a leisure
time activity or sport;
provision for school swimming lessons
in local authority pools should be written into the Strategy and
Best Value requirements for all pools as a right, not as a discretion.
This philosophy needs to be recognised in the funding arrangements
for pools in order that prohibitive costs are not passed on to
schools simply to meet budget requirements when no matter which
agency meet these costs the funding is from the "public purse";
and
better links need to be developed
from school swimming to swimming as a sporting and recreational
activity for children by providing inducements to children to
use swimming pools and by providing developmental pathways. The
best examples of this are currently Glasgow with their free swimming
policy for all children under the age of 16 and a number of local
authorities who grant free or greatly subsidised swimming use
for those children who achieve the Key Stage 2 requirement. In
a recent study when children were asked whether there was enough
to do in the area where they live, in all age groups two thirds
said no, in the 15-17 age group 80 per cent said no!
Swimming and individualisation
Will Hutton recently stated "Mass participation
in sport would make us all healthier; it would produce a stronger
sense of community, and help reduce social exclusion and personal
alienation".
"We are living in an age in which the old
parameters of social class and local community are breaking down.
The nine-to-five, secure, Monday to Friday, 40-hour-a-week job
is disappearing. Families are splitting and being remade; within
10 years, 40 per cent of children will live in stepfamilies. Thirty
per cent of men now work for 48 hours or more; weekend work is
becoming commonplace. Fewer and fewer of us know who lives in
our street. We shop, work and spend our leisure time within our
own networks well beyond where we live. But as these old sources
of identity change, so we are forced to become the creators of
own identity, if we are to make any sense of our lives. The rise
in interest in personal fitness and well-being is part of a much
wider trend in which we are insisting on the primacy of our own
choices as the way to assert meaning in a world where so much
is in flux. Divorce, the growth in designer clothes and the boom
in personal fitness clubs have common roots in what the German
sociologist Ulrich Beck calls `individualisation'."
"If these are the factors underpinning
the trends in sport, then the thrust of policy should be to develop
a public infrastructure for more individual sports participation.
There are too few public swimming pools, for example, and most
of them are far too expensive with disastrously unsavoury changing
rooms. Most public leisure centres cannot match private health
and fitness clubs in their facilities; we need better. In short,
we should go with the grain of people's sports interests. It will
involve more public money than has so far been earmarked; but
it will reap much richer dividends."
Swimming charges
The Government has allocated funds to enable
trustees of admission charging national museums to offer free
entrance for children from April 1999 and for over 60's from April
2000. The widening of free access will mean that about 20 million
people can visit the national Museums and Galleries free of charge,
with around two million people being over the age of 60 and around
4.5 million children under the age of 16. The first year of the
free access for children to all the Department's previously charging
Museums and Galleries has seen an increase in children's visits
of almost a fifth on the previous year. Further measures to enhance
access for the public as a whole are planned for next year. Under
the Government's "Quids In" proposals, the adult entry
charge at the charging national museums will be cut to £1
from September 2001.
The case for a similar treatment for public
swimming and sport and recreation is even greater. If free access
to our national treasures is justifiable on the grounds that it
provides benefits to us all as a society then aren't the benefits
of sport and recreation even more tangible and overwhelming? What
greater treasure is there than the health-giving and life-preserving
potential of swimming?
Delivering to a wider agenda
Today many local authorities are moving their
facilities into trusts for the principle reason of avoiding paying
rates and VAT. What on earth are these services doing paying such
taxes in the first place? Swimming can provide real tangible benefits
to both individuals and the communities in which they live, including
huge savings in health service costs. What sense is there in putting
up barriers through taxation to local authorities in providing
and operating services when they can deliver such benefits to
the nation's economy?
We need to give greater recognition to the role
that community-swimming provision can play in society if we care
about the future of sport and the health and future of our children.
We need to capitalise on the high profile that swimming has in
the popularity stakes with young children and translate interest
into action. We need to continue and advance programmes that break
down the barriers, which result in gender inequities. Swimming
and sport has a major role to play in the new social agenda it
can have a unique and significant influence in such cross-cutting
issues as health, community development, personal development
and self esteem, literacy and numeracy, national and local pride,
equity and harmony, crime and social inclusion. But first we need
to harness it, and then structure to use this power for good,
in the most effective way.
The role of the professional
The ISRM believe that fundamental to this whole
process is the effective management of pools in a way that ensures
they provide a meaningful role in the communities. Pools also
need managing for safety and to ensure that the swimming environment
is conducive to health promoting activity. Society has the right
to expect that the professional pool manager is technically proficient,
with the knowledge, understanding and competence covered by their
profession, to demonstrate integrity and high standards of ethical
behaviour and to apply their professional skills in ways which
are relevant to the changing contexts in which they work. The
reality is that anyone can operate a pool without any of the necessary
knowledge skills or training. ISRM is the professional body that
provides qualifications for sport and recreation managers and
aims to promote greater recognition and awareness from the providers
of swimming and sports facilities together with national and local
regulatory bodies of the importance of our training and qualification
programmes.
FACILITIES AND
TRAINING SUPPORT
FOR COMPETITIVE
SWIMMERS
The structure
If the nation is ever to be successful in competitive
swimming then we need a number of basic provisions. Firstly we
need to give all children the opportunity to shine, so that means
getting swimming established in the school curriculum to the extent
that children can pursue developmental pathways from learning
to swim to competitive swimming, initially locally and then on
to regional and national structures.
Time and opportunity
In providing these pathways there must be water
time in which to learn and train and compete, there must be people
available with expertise to teach and coach and there must be
a competitive structure in place which usually means a competitive
swimming club who the progressing swimmer can join and look for
guidance and opportunities to develop further.
Given that the schools provide the basic learning
and the ASA the teacher's, coaches and competition the aspect
of this structure that is of greatest concern to the ISRM is access
to water time.
Financial targets
Nearly all public pools operate at a financial
deficit and with local authorities increasingly under pressure
financially swimming pools must seek to manage their deficit to
minimum levels. For many this means operating very commercially,
maximising the opportunities to earn income often at the expense
of providing a balanced programme of swimming provision. Elite
swimmers require a lot of water time to practise often two to
three hours a day. To be successful a competitive swimming club
needs to offer water time to its members at popular times when
the local authority pool operator is reluctant to turn away a
more lucrative form of use.
Increased local authority commitment
The only answer to local authorities providing
time for competitive swimmers to practise and for competitive
clubs to function is to develop a swimming strategy that recognises
these needs and provides for them by increased public subsidy.
This can take a number of forms for example providing more flexible
pools that can be used for a variety of different purposes through
the use of moveable floors and booms, but this is long term and
costly. Inevitably it will also mean pool operators providing
substantial time in the swimming programme when competitive swimmers
can practice and clubs can function at an affordable cost that
promotes rather than prohibits. This is one of the wicked issues
that beset Best Value in local authorities for although it is
perfectly feasible to develop a swimming strategy that meets the
needs of developing participation through to excellence it is
only possible to do so through increased public subsidy and may
impact upon the wider community use of pools.
Success has a price
Our nation has a proud history in competitive
swimming and if we are to give the swimmers of today and tomorrow
the opportunities for success then we need to provide them with
the resources equal to and beyond that of their competitors in
other countries. There is more than national pride at stake here,
children, need role models, heroes that can inspire them to do
great things with their own lives. We desperately need swimming
heroes, if for example you were asked to name the nation's top
swimmers most people we know would come up with names from the
past like Sharron Davies, Anita Lonsbrough, Duncan Goodhew and
Adrian Moorhouse. Very few people could name the top swimmers
from the today's elite squad even though they are extremely worthy
of such fame and recognition.
26 November 2001
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